1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to systems and methods for disaster recovery for computer systems and more particularly to systems and methods for backing up a workstation on a computer network and restoring local data to the workstation in the event of a system crash (i.e., disaster recovery).
2. Background
The contents of the data of a computer may be destroyed or become unavailable by the user's operation of the computer or by a breakdown in the storage device (hard disk crash). The loss of data results in significant damage in terms of time, money and other resources. To minimize damage, backup systems and software have been developed which make a complete copy of the data on a user's hard drive. The backups of the data are done usually at a predetermined time, and generally require the computer to execute an application program to accomplish the backup. Thus, in the event of hard drive failure, the data may be copied back from the backup via an application program.
Generally, there are two current methods of backing up a computer: backing up files (backup using computer media such as a CD-RW or magnetic tape) or drive imaging. Backing up files copies the files onto another medium one by one (in an original or compressed form). Backup are usually performed at the end of a user session after a predetermined period of time or event (e.g., daily, weekly, monthly, sales period, after placement of purchase orders, etc.).
Although backup methods are usually very complete in making a copy of the files on the old hard drive, the restore process is slow and requires the user to first format and/or partition the hard drive, reinstall the operating system software, install the system registry information and install the “restore” application program. Thereafter, using the restore program, the user may then copy the backup files from the backup media to the hard drive. However, it is likely that applications need to be reinstalled from their original installation disks since backup copies of such software rarely works reliably. Thus, although file backup methods make excellent full copies of files for disaster recovery, the restore process makes it somewhat tedious and difficult to use.
Moreover, file backup methods take up a great deal of system resources for a computer network that needs files on all workstations to be backed up.
Alternatively, drive imaging enables a user to image their entire hard drive bit by bit, making an exact duplicate of the drive. The image is obtained, however, with the use of an imaging application in which the computer is separately booted (generally with a separate boot diskette) to run an imaging application. Moreover, to restore the drive, the user boots the computer (with a separate diskette generally) into a restoring environment (restore application), which then copies the image back from the separate media upon which the image is stored to the hard drive, which completely restores the drive to its original condition.
However, imaging the drives of all the workstations of an entire network still takes considerable resources and memory storage. Since the storage space requirements and the intrusive nature of the image creation process, imaging has never been considered a viable alternative to backing up and restoring data from individual computers. Accordingly, there exists a need for disaster recovery which addresses the above noted drawbacks of the current backup and restore methods and systems.